Mendelssohn's Double Concerto has many of the hallmarks of his precocious youth, including the gift for making his well-learnt counterpoint lessons bear fruit in lively, fluent part-writing that never sounds merely mechanical, and in the finale a sense of brilliance and pace that is already personal. There is also a tendency to run away with himself: very soon, he was to learn to discipline his invention more effectively. However, that is no excuse for the piecemeal cuts which mark, and in some cases mar, the new version. It is incredible to have cut four bars from the second subject in the exposition of the first movement, the more so when the version played by the solo violinist includes their equivalent. I reckon that somewhere between a quarter and a third of the whole work must have been lost, quite unnecessarily when the total timing of the disc is only 43 minutes.
In any case, though this is a fresh and attractive performance by Rudner and Entremont, it does not have quite the flair of the uncut version on DG by Gidon Kremer and Martha Argerich. Their coupling is an excellent performance by Kremer of the early D minor Violin Concerto. The present one is less attractive. Viotti's concerto ''with obbligato violin'' is an odd hybrid, somewhere nearer sinfonia concertante than true concerto. It began life some time in the mid 1780s as a violin concerto; a few years later, Viotti rearranged the first and last movements in the present form. It includes some lively and attractive music, quite modern for its date, but I doubt if interest in Viotti would outweigh for most collectors the benefits of the other record.'